For thousands of South Africans, tuberculosis (TB) is not missed because treatment doesn’t exist, it is missed because the disease is often detected too late.
Now, a Pretoria-developed Nexus AI, an artificial intelligence screening tool is helping healthcare workers identify people who show no obvious symptoms, giving patients in rural communities and other underserved areas a better chance of receiving treatment before the disease becomes life-threatening.
Already being used in community screening programmes in the Northern Cape, Eastern Cape, and Durban, the AI-assisted chest X-ray tool is helping frontline healthcare workers identify people who might otherwise have been sent home without further testing.
Andries Vorster, co-founder of the Pretoria-based health technology company behind the innovation said the idea was born after years of seeing people miss out on timely diagnoses simply because there were too few specialists available to interpret X-rays.
“It was not one isolated patient but a pattern we saw repeatedly over many years of supporting X-ray services in rural communities, mobile clinics, and under-resourced health facilities across Africa,” Vorster said.
